All the Little Things

by Sarah Lawton

  Maybe she kept something on her laptop. Molly always kept her little laptop hidden away underneath things because she was paranoid about burglars. Like burglars would bother with the crappy houses in this poxy place. I can’t see it anywhere and I try to remember if she brought it upstairs on Saturday. She usually would. I’m sure she did, under her arm, swaying up the stairs. She probably squirrelled it when I was in the bathroom, putting that stupid nightie on. Assuming Abi doesn’t already have it, where would she have put it? Where would I hide something if I were Molly? Tall, slim Molly. My eyes go to the built-in wardrobe and the cupboards above it. I’m going to need the chair.

  I spot the corner of the laptop, with its charger cord wrapped around it, underneath the winter clothes that are stuffed in the last cupboard I check. I can’t believe Abi hasn’t looked properly, frantically searching for every clue. Maybe she thinks Molly took it away with her. That would make sense, I suppose. Maybe she wasn’t expecting it still to be here, and her room’s such a tip it’s impossible to see what Molly might have taken with her. I don’t have a laptop; I have to share Mum’s. I think Molly would want me to have her laptop, to look after it. Her secret keeper. There could be anything on here, now I think of it.

  * * *

  ‘Did you find anything, Vivian? Any notes or numbers or anything, anything at all?’ Abi is where I left her, sitting on the tall stool at the kitchen island, hands wringing in her lap. Her eyes drop. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s my hoody,’ I tell her, even though it’s actually one of Molly’s that I’ve never seen her wear. It was stuffed down the back of her wardrobe with tags still on it. It’s too big for me but it’s wrapped around the little laptop and you can’t see the edges, the way I’m holding it to me as if I’m hugging it for comfort. I don’t need the charger as it’s the same make as Mum’s – I can use hers to charge it. I hid that inside the drawer unit, pulling the bottom one right out and dropping it in the space behind, underneath. No one will think to look for it there.

  ‘I’m sorry, Abi, but it all looks normal. Her drawers are a mess – it looks like she’s taken some stuff. I think she had a big rucksack, but I can’t see it. You remember, the green one? From the school trip last year?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Thank you, Vivian. I’m sorry I dragged you over like this. You think I’m an idiot, don’t you?’ Her wet eyes are cast down at the floor so she doesn’t see me bite my lip to stop myself saying ‘yes’. Instead I mumble a quick apology and I’m out of the door before she can try and hug me again.

  Rachel

  I was in the shower leaning my head on the cool tiles when Alex slipped into the bathroom, and into the cubicle with me. I didn’t even start in surprise; it was almost like I expected him to be there, like I had conjured him up as part of a fantasy. He must have just let himself in after Vivian left. I didn’t care. His hands slid around my waist and up and over the edges of my ribs to briefly cup my breasts before sliding away again. He pressed himself against my back and a rush of goosebumps sprang up on my skin. I heard him squeeze a bottle and a floral scent mingled with the hiss of the water before his hands touched my head. I hadn’t been to the hairdressers in years, preferring to snip at it myself, and I had forgotten the special intimacy of someone washing your hair, of their fingers slowly moving on your scalp. Mine tightened with pleasure, along with other parts of my body. I pushed back against him, against how much he wanted me. He ignored it, and kept gently circling his fingertips on my head, tilting it back and smoothing the water through it to rinse away the suds which pooled at our feet.

  He kissed my neck, his hands returning to my body, slipping down the silky trails left by the rinsed shampoo, easily, smoothly. His clever fingers playing my body, moving from breasts to hips, between my legs too briefly, before skipping away again until I moaned with frustration, at which point he spun me to him and lifted me easily, kissing me with a fury that scorched my mouth and bruised my lips. He pressed me up against the tiles, easily holding me in place with one arm and the weight of his body while he used his other hand to guide himself into me. He stopped then, and held me, relishing the heat we made together and the cool water that slithered over us, slicked our skin. He rocked against me, hard, and the pleasure that built up between us was more intense than anything I’d ever felt before.

  * * *

  ‘Where did you learn that?’ I asked him afterwards, as we lay on my bed, my eyes distracted by the long hand that was tracing the contours of my hips, the dips and peaks.

  ‘Learn what?’ he smiled, his voice gruff and almost shy.

  ‘Come on. I’m pretty sure that sort of thing doesn’t come naturally.’

  ‘You seem to come naturally.’ He laughed, easing his body over mine. Surely not again? He dipped his head to kiss slowly along my collarbone, propping himself on his arms which were either side of my chest, framing me.

  ‘I don’t know, really. I’ve had a few girlfriends. Women seem to like me for some reason.’

  I couldn’t think why.

  ‘I just never thought it was always as nice for women, you know? My first girlfriend didn’t seem to like anything, so I tried things until she did.’

  ‘What happened to her?’ I asked him, feeling suddenly short of breath as I felt his body start to stir again.

  ‘She went to uni, miles away,’ he murmured, mouth at my breasts, breath tickling. ‘Were you worried you had deflowered me, Rachel?’ He looked up at me with those wicked eyes and used his knee to move my legs apart, teasing me again. They were dark pools of colour in his face that I could have drowned in. Perhaps I did drown in them, the pleasure numbing everything else.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, thrusting suddenly, marvellously, gasping. ‘I’m thoroughly despoiled.’

  * * *

  Later, I made my way to the studio, leaving Alex asleep on my bed, after he’d fucked me again. I want to say he made love to me, but how could it have been love, what I was doing? I was using him to hurt myself, and it was as delicious as it was painful. Self-harm without the razor blade. I knew that if it were found out, I would be a pariah in the small judgemental village; I was risking my carefully crafted small life. Vivian would be furious, disgusted. She would quite possibly never speak to me again, or worse.

  Better now to remember it as somehow brutal, animalistic. Better to forget the sweet trailing kisses that searched out every tender spot, the hands that stroked me as though I were clay to be moulded, perfected. The ocean eyes that held mine as my body shook, again and again, our hot breath fusing. It was a madness.

  I had sat and watched him sleep for a while, traced him with my eyes, but it felt deeply wrong, like I didn’t deserve that vulnerable part of him. He looked even younger when he was asleep, and I felt as old as I have ever felt. So I pulled on a dress and nothing else and I left him there, and retreated to the garden.

  The air sang with light, it burst through the trees and sparkled on the glass doors of my studio. Such a bright, light day, despite the fear and the grief and the guilt that swamped me. Surely it should have been dark, cold, grey. Surely the colours should have been muted. I tried to work, but I couldn’t find that place inside myself where it came from, that spark. Nothing came out right – how could I paint a prince who wasn’t the boy sleeping in my bed? Much less pair him with the girl I had pictured as being my daughter, before I had replaced her face with my own. I didn’t belong there any more, so I went back to the house.

  Alex was sitting at the kitchen table, the kettle starting to boil. He looked up at me unsmilingly as I walked in, and pushed himself back on the chair. I took off my dress.

  * * *

  Abi called me on Wednesday, around lunchtime. She had finally convinced the police to take her seriously. Molly was a serial runaway – never longer than forty-eight hours – but there were records of it, and they’d done two full-scale searches, the whole village out in the woods, on the previous occasions, only for her to saunter home as if nothing h
ad happened. The girl who cried wolf. But now they were listening, and they wanted to talk to Vivian.

  I took the call from my bed, where Alex and I had ended up after he had appeared yet again, minutes after Vivian left for school. It was like her voice was in a bubble, and I was in another. Alex was kissing the insides of my thighs and running his hands up and down my stomach, down over my hips to my knees and back again. I wanted to grab his thick, silky hair and direct him to exactly where I wanted him, but there was this voice on the phone, telling me that the police wanted to speak to my daughter. Through the haze I remembered another voice, long ago, telling me the same thing – little red hands – but I didn’t want to think about that, either. I managed to tell her, to choke it out, that Vivian would be home around four and I hung up and I buried my fingers where I wanted them and roughly pulled Alex to where I wanted him, and everything dissolved around me.

  * * *

  ‘What was that call about?’ Alex was nuzzling into my neck, brushing the tip of his nose through the hair above my ear, inhaling as he did. I cringed away, ticklish, but his arm was over me, holding me fast against him. He slung over a leg for good measure. ‘Rach?’

  I took a breath, reluctant to break the spell we had created together with such horrible news. ‘One of my daughter’s friends has gone missing,’ I told him, watching his face change. ‘The police want to speak to her about it.’

  ‘Really? That sounds bad. Is Vivian worried?’ He moved back and propped himself on an elbow, looking down at me.

  ‘I… I haven’t really spoken to her about it…’

  ‘You haven’t spoken to her about it?’

  I could hear something in his voice, concern maybe. Or contempt. But it was true, I had barely seen Vivian, let alone spoken to her about it.

  ‘Molly has a habit of pulling stunts like this.’ I felt guilty for saying it, but it was true.

  ‘Disappearing? Do you think Vivian knows what has happened to her?’

  ‘I’m sure nothing has happened to her, Alex. But the police are coming later to speak to her. Vivian was the last person to see her, as far as we know.’

  I felt Alex go still for a moment; he closed his eyes.

  ‘Are they doing searches?’

  ‘No, not yet, I don’t think.’

  ‘And they want to question Vivian? Do you think the police think she might have something to do with it?’

  I sat up. ‘What! Alex, no, of course not! What on earth would make you say that?’ He looked at me sideways, pressed his lips together as if he wanted to say more. He reached up and pulled me back down beside him, pulling the sheet up to cover us.

  ‘What is she like?’ he asked, before pressing his lips to a sensitive spot on my neck.

  ‘Who, Molly? She’s lovely, I don’t know why—’

  ‘No, not Molly – Vivian. What is Vivian like? Are you close?’ I wasn’t sure I felt comfortable talking about Vivian with Alex – in fact, it felt horrible, like I was betraying her somehow – but he looked at me and I had a strange sense that it was somehow important to him, and it made me honest. ‘Yes, we’re close. It’s only the two of us. She’s very much her own person though, I guess. She’s happy here, she has lovely friends – when they aren’t running off, anyway. She’s extraordinarily clever, but naïve at the same time. I wonder if she knows as much about the world as she thinks she does, sometimes.’

  ‘When was she not happy? It sounds like she’s happy now but wasn’t before.’

  I wriggled around to face him, to look at him. ‘No, she wasn’t. She had a very bad time at her old primary school. She never told me that she was being bullied, but my mother knew – she tried to tell me about it, but I was so busy all the time, I let things slip. The other children didn’t like her for some reason. I think when you’re as smart as she is from a young age it can make you seem a bit odd to other kids, who aren’t quite there yet. And she’s always been very small for her age, easy to push around.’

  ‘She didn’t have any friends at all?’

  ‘Only one, for a while. It became quite intense, and it didn’t end well. We moved here to get a fresh start. Everything has been fine since we lived here, we’ve both been happy here.’ Despite my words I could feel my throat tightening as I thought about everything that was happening, what I was doing that could ruin that happiness, the stupid, addictive affair we were having and what Vivian might do if she found out about it.

  ‘Didn’t end well?’ The odd tone in his voice unnerved me, tipped me over the edge. ‘What did your mother know? Did she… oh, shit, Rachel, please don’t cry. I’m sorry, please…’ I couldn’t stop the tears, even as he tried to kiss them away. What would my mother think about what I was doing? Letting Vivian down again. I forced my reply out.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, darling. She died, just before we had to leave London. It was an awful shock. We lived with her, Vivian and me. It broke me, then there was an accident at school, it was just too much. I can’t…’

  ‘Shh, it’s fine, I’m so sorry, Rachel – I shouldn’t have asked. I’m the first person to know you shouldn’t ask about family, believe me.’ He kissed me, kissed my cheeks until my tears stopped, and we were quiet after that, both lost in our own thoughts.

  Vivian

  The police are at my house when I get home from school, two of them sitting in the front room. I’m not happy that Mum hasn’t thought to warn me about this and I glare at her for a second. She looks like she’s been taking antidepressants again: her face is almost slack, and vacant. She’s in one of her weird moods, which is perfect bloody timing. She always goes to pieces when things aren’t going exactly how she wants them to be. She’s pathetic. I’m sick of her moping about Tristan – what even was he to her? He was my friend’s brother. Now she’s going to try to make people feel sorry for her about Molly when she has no right. She was my friend. It’s always about her, and her secret scars and her dead parents. I hate her.

  ‘Vivian?’ The female police officer stands up from our sofa to shake my hand. She’s tall, toweringly so, with frizzy blonde hair and rough red cheeks. She doesn’t smile at me and I wonder for a stomach-looping second if they’ve found Molly. ‘Would you like to sit down? We need to ask you a few questions about Molly’s disappearance.’ She sits back down, next to the man who is looking at me as he pulls out a notebook from his utility belt thing. I wonder if he’s got a taser.

  I sit down reluctantly. There’s a gap that seems to take for ever between that and the police officer talking again. No doubt on purpose, trying to put me on edge. I assume that she must be in charge because the other officer with her doesn’t say anything; he just makes notes in his little black notebook. I wonder if they are local police or if they’ve come down from the city especially.

  ‘Vivian, what time did you last see Molly on Saturday night?’

  ‘I don’t know what time it was. I woke up and wanted to leave, so I came home.’

  ‘And you didn’t check the time?’

  ‘No. I didn’t have my phone.’

  ‘And you didn’t check it when you came in?’

  ‘No. I just went straight to bed. I was tired.’

  ‘What did Molly say when you left?’

  ‘Nothing. She was asleep. I was too hot at her house. She would never open the window.’

  ‘How has Molly been recently? Have you noticed anything unusual in her behaviour, or has she said anything to you about being unhappy?’

  I think of her half-naked, grinding onto Matthew Grey. I think of her texting my Alex, trying to break us up, of her touching me. I think of the silver tear slick on her face.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anything you can remember could be important, Vivian. She hasn’t been seen by anyone since Saturday. Was she involved with anyone?’

  ‘Yes.’ I suddenly think of something I can actually tell them. ‘Actually, yes, she was. She was having a thing with Tristan, Tilly Beaumont’s brother who died. They’d been having sex.’ />
  I see Mum rock slightly at this news – she had no idea Molly wasn’t an angel. I wonder if she has any idea that I have had sex. I don’t think so, she’s been so out of it lately. I’m sure I’m still innocent little Vivian in her stupid blind eyes.

  ‘That’s something we have been bearing in mind, Vivian,’ says PC Red Cheeks. ‘That she may have been upset by Tristan’s murder.’

  ‘Murder!’ Mum suddenly pipes up, horror in her voice. ‘He was in an accident, he wasn’t murdered!’

  ‘On the contrary, Miss Sanders,’ says the male policeman in a rough, gravelled voice that doesn’t suit his young face, ‘we believe that Tristan’s car may have been tampered with in some way prior to his accident. We are conducting enquiries as to that effect, and we also believe that Molly’s disappearance could be connected. This is a small place, after all. If they were having some sort of relationship, it could be a lead.’

  I’m not impressed about what they are saying about Tristan’s death. I fidget, uneasy. No one actually wanted him to die, that’s just ridiculous. If he’s dead, it was his own fault that he couldn’t control his car properly, surely? How is that murder?

  ‘She wasn’t just with Tristan, though,’ I blurt out, disconcerted by this turn of events and wanting to get them under my control again. ‘She was having sex with other boys, too. You should speak to Matthew Grey from school as well, and there are probably others. She was going off the rails, but no one knew why. I think she was drinking a lot too – cider and stuff, maybe vodka. She was drunk all the time. She always runs away, I’m sure she’ll be back soon, pretending nothing has happened.’ I deliberately cast my eyes down, bite my lip, hitch a breath. Should I tell them she was secretly in love with me too? No.